ROUND 20: 🇲🇽 Mexico
FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO DE LA CIUDAD DE MÉXICO 2024
Circuit stats
- Circuit name: Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez
- First Grand Prix: 1963
- Number of laps: 71
- Circuit Length: 4.304 km
- Race Distance: 305.354 km
- Lap record: 1:17.774 Valtteri Bottas (2021)
- 2023 winner: Max Verstappen
Track Map
Great race! Verstappen finally penalized! And Mexico City finally gets a Spanish-speaking winner!
McLaren should be very worried in the constructors championship
A penalty was justified but 20 seconds was insanely excessive, and completely out of contrast to similar incidents and penalties in previous races, completely took the most interesting battle out of the race.
Rest of the race was pretty boring. Very few overtakes that actually mattered. The one battle that could’ve been interesting ended up not happening due to Leclerc almost going into the wall.
He got a serious warning last week, but he did not learn from it. This will cost him badly, next year Norris will drive nr 1. Maybe that will be a lesson for him.
This was actually good and worthwhile from Max’s perspective. He got to hold Norris up the whole first stint, which ultimately most likely cost him the win. Norris P1 and Max P4 would have been a much worse outcome for him points-wise, so I’m not sure Max is going to learn a whole lot from this race other than “I’ll do it again”.
No driver intentionally picks up 20 seconds in delays. He’ll have to be more cautious if he wants to win.
The minimum penalty for that type of incident is 10 seconds. The T8 incident is unquestionably a penalty. The T4 incident was separate and if the FIA also penalizes that, it has to be 20 seconds total.
The FIA says the outcome of the incident doesn’t influence the penalty, so by similar logic you’d think subsequent incidents would also not affect the penalty.
We had three 5 seconds penalties for pushing a driver off track last week. In all cases, the driver pushed off track lost position. Yesterday Lando cut the chicane after being forced wide and ended up ahead of Verstappen resulting in a gain of position. Considering all this, how is 10 seconds justified here for the T4 incident¿? T8 was a much more egregious move by max and was proportionally punished.
A… surprisingly decent race for Mexico? Not a classic by any means, but considering the circuit we take these. More overtakes than I would have expected, several incidents of driver drama to keep us occupied while the drivers manage their overheating cars - and we even got to pretend there was a chance of rain for a couple of minutes. It’s a shame Norris never had to make an actual overtake on Leclerc at the end, but the chase was still somewhat exciting, and we got a bona fide battle between Hamilton and Russel as well.
Shame about Albon, that man has had some rotten luck this season. Also very unlucky for Alonso to end his 400th race weekend in a DNF, but I can’t imagine he would have been able to do much this race regardless.
Stewarding and the FIA rules will be the main takeaway, and while I’m glad Max is getting penalised for once I can’t wait until they address the rules. Though the inconsistent stewarding had been almost as big an issue so maybe I’m fooling myself into thinking anything will change.
Anyway, with Ferrari smelling blood in the fight for WCC (and technically WDC) I’m really looking forward to Interlagos now - probably the best track on the calendar?
As a Kiwi, it was good to see Liam Lawson show some pace, especially during the early to middle part of the race. Hopefully he gets a permanent seat at the end of the year 🤞
